Samsung plans flexible, unbreakable, lighter phones

November 26, 2012

(Credit: Samsung)

Samsung plans to start mass production of displays using plastic rather than glass to make mobile devices unbreakable, lighter, and bendable, to be released in the first half of next year, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Samsung’s flexible displays will incorporate OLEDs, a display technology that the South Korean company is already using in its smartphones and television sets. OLEDs are thin and can be put on flexible material such as plastic or metal foil.

The technology could also help lower manufacturing costs and help differentiate its products, the WSJ says.

What we are talking about here are viable wrist phone watches – Dick Tracy style. They will allow us to send text messages, browse the web, send email, perform sophisticated calculations, do word processing, track our whereabouts, record audio and video, monitor our vital signs, help us cybernetically adapt our fitness goals in real time, and if we are lucky tell time and make phone calls.

Well I can see an application as a future newspaper – if the and chip, battery are in one corner and you have a full two pages fold-able newspaper that updates every day and you still can check out older news – well that would be neat :)

They have bendable batteries and processors too? And plastic screen means back to major scratch-ville. Give me my gorilla glass. No doubt bendable devices are coming, but I didn’t think all the pieces awere available yet.

The technology’s great in theory, but if they manufacture phones in the shapes featured above they look highly impractical, they would be a nightmare to try and fit in your pocket.

Also I see the benefit of the phone being more flexible therefore less prone to breakages, however I can’t see any really benefits of a phone that you can bend. Plus, if that was to be the case, then all the components would need to be bendable as well, which would be much more difficult.

Sam, the ones in the pic are in thick metal frames to hold those shapes so everyone at the trade show can see that the screen bends (and that nobody messes with the prototypes). They’re not idiots who forgot what people’s pockets or hands look like.

That being said…I think they’d like to have the screen ‘fold’ over a much smaller phone, but that’s a problem in that phone still needs space for board, chips, battery, etc. AND these screen can’t bend ‘that’ sharply. That’s why they only risked displaying a ~1 inch dia. bend in the prototypes.
The first one might just end up being a thinner, lighter phone with less worry of the screen ‘cracking’ if you dropped it. BUT the phone itself could still break w/ a fall and I’d think the screen would be less scratch resistant than a GorillaGlass type (or the same if both have the same protective film.

For a bending screen being ‘neato’ tech, I don’t think they know what to do with it yet. I’ve seen designs where the screen ‘unrolls’, but that creates a (relatively) large thickness when rolled up. No one wants a ‘fat pen phone’.
They know what they need to do to make it functional, but I don’t think they can do it yet -on top of the woman saying the screen itself is hard to make. This is mostly hype, but it does sound like screens like this are pretty close to market. I’d think people would love desktop versions, but I’m sure those would be a fortune.

I want my 110″ OLED roll-down self-projection screen. The perfect home theater display and best fit for a bendy, paper-thin display. But that’ll be another decade probably.